Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment

1. Getting Tough on Women: How Punishment Changed

>> 21 1 Getting Tough on Women How Punishment Changed Everything’s changing. We’re not supposed to call the warden “Daddy” anymore. —Prisoner, on the transition to the new prison Unfounding is like rewriting history. —Warden Richardson Warden Richardson looked uncomfortable during the press conference. He was a large man with a commanding presence, but today, as he waited to be introduced, he was decidedly unsettled. He alternately shifted his weight forward onto the balls of his feet and then backward onto his heels until he lost his balance and had to be steadied by a correctional officer. He fumbled with his watchband, wiped his eyeglasses, and elaborately folded and refolded his handkerchief before returning it to his pocket. When it was finally his turn to speak, he appeared startled and asked a well-dressed man to his left if he would prefer to introduce himself. The man smiled faintly and nodded for the warden to begin. The warden cleared his throat, welcomed everyone to East State Women’s Correctional Institution, and declared, “Today is the sixty-fifth anniversary of our founding as the first and only women’s prison in the state. I am also pleased to announce that we are here to celebrate not one but two anniversaries, for today is the first anniversary of our future.” He spoke briefly of the prison’s origins in the 19th-century reformatory movement and its long-standing commitment to rehabilitating women prisoners. He then motioned the well-dressed man to come forward and introduced him as a “partner and pioneer in correctional innovation” and a “strategic resource for winning the War on Drugs.” 22 > 23 of correctional medical care in the country.1 The Company was a joint sponsor of the press conference and, it would seem, of the future of punishment more generally. Invitations to the event billed it as a coming-out party in honor of the “promising future of women’s corrections,” and a celebration of the “strategic” partnering of government and private industry to resolve the interrelated problems of drug addiction, crime, and prison overcrowding. The press conference was staged inside one of the prison’s largest housing units and attended by a mix of criminal justice insiders and professional outsiders, among them journalists, politicians, judges, prosecutors, administrators of social service agencies, university researchers, and community organizers. The focus of the day’s festivities was not on either of the most visible and costly developments that had recently taken root at East State Women’s Correctional Institution. The press release made no mention of the fact that the facility where we all assembled was barely two years old and was the architectural antithesis of its reformatory-era predecessor. Nor did any of the day’s speakers address the installation of new surveillance equipment, even though this had been the subject of an intense and ultimately successful campaign by officials from the state Department of Correction to convince prison administrators of its utility. As the day’s proceedings wore on, it became clear that the key harbinger of the penological future was not to be found in electronics or architecture. Rather, the future was in social technologies that advanced the possibility of both organizational and individual transformation. Speaker after speaker revealed that these technologies held the promise of remaking women drug offenders into law-abiding citizens, and antiquated, seemingly ineffectual total institutions like the prison into “bottom line” organizations. Both sets of transformations would be realized in and through Project Habilitate Women, an experimental drug treatment program that was designed and managed by the Company and housed and operated within the institutional environs of the prison. When asked by a reporter how the program would bring about such sweeping changes, Dr. Nesbitt leaned forward to reply but was interrupted by the warden, who said with a wink, “We’re unfounding rehabilitation.” It was an intriguing turn of phrase. “Unfounding” is part of the lexicon of the criminal justice system, although the warden’s use of the term was a creative appropriation from its customary usage. The term traditionally refers to a formal statement issued by police departments declaring that a crime previously thought to have occurred never actually took place. As a record-keeping practice, unfounding is intended to correct for crime reports that turn out to be false or erroneous (e.g., “police unfounded the crime after learning the report was false”). But it is a political practice as well. Unfounding offers 24 > 25 the phenomenon...